In a three year stretch where I have started working for one of the UK's most archaic institutions (The Church of England), become a dad and turned 30, I was always going to get to the point where I felt that I had to play catchup with the world. Now, these and other things - buying Q Magazine, listening to Radio 2 (occasionally), and berating all the mindless pap in the Pop Charts - are all things which have at various points made me feel like a dinosaur. But nothing quite so much as my relationship with new technology, which has been at best sporadic, and at worst resembled that bit at the end of "one potato, two potato..." - you know what I mean.I never had a SNES, was the last of my mates to get a mobile phone and listened a bit too much to my grandparents in my youth, but on leaving University I quickly became a new man, getting properly PC literate and even ending up in a job in web design (sort of). All this made me feel a little more down with the kids.
But since leaving the world of work to become a theology student in 2005 I've pretty much been in catchup mode since. It's not being slightly behind or ignorant which has made me feel the most out of touch, though, as being able to articulate some sort of half-baked argument against the philosophy of the thing.
Am I the only one, for example, who finds it a little creepy that one day I can do a Google search for a couple of bedside tables, and the next the very same tables appear alongside a portrait of Geoffrey Boycott on cricinfo.com? Or maybe I'm a little bit antisocial not being entirely interested in each and every song my friends are listening to on Spotify. I certainly don't want people from church to know when I'm playing Bejewelled Blitz, in any case.
However the weirdest, and slightly scariest one, recently has been Klout. Klout is an idea which not entirely unlike Nazi Germany appeals to some of one's least redeemed characteristics. In this case it's need to feel important or significant. It seems to me like the sort of logical outcome of Facebook, a linking up of all social networks, tracking the sorts of people you know and how many to give you a score of how much clout (Klout) you have.
Fair enough. I mean, I assumed it was one of those online tests, which would give you a score, and you'd go - oh, well, I thought I was a bit more important than that, and then move on to the next one. So I signed up, it gave me a pretty rubbish score of 10, and then I forgot about it. Only to find out in a few weeks that I was still signed up, my score (miraculously) had increased to 50, that there was no way of deleting my account, that Klout had access to all my friends and was most likely using them for marketing purposes, and was most likely in contravention of the data protection act.
I deleted my account. Apparently they had decided to add the function. I can rest easy in my bed now. Not just that I'm no longer being exploited, but because in some sense the world of social networking has found its limit of acceptability and that my uneasiness was not entirely down to my increasing alienation from popular culture.
Read more about the evils of Klout here:
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